It’s a challenge to find new things to blog about, mostly because I am so boring, and the boundaries of my fascinations and interests so seldom extend outside the mundanities of my own mind. A blog is supposed to be, in part, an expression of what makes the blogger unique. And one of the things that makes someone unique is his or her unique intrerests, the things he or she pays attention to that few others do.

And another thing is the edges of concrete footings that have been exposed by soil erosion.

Why does this capture my attention? I don’t know. I wish I did.

If I had to put it into words, I guess I’d say that it’s a simple, omnipresent illustration of our hubris in our belief that we can control nature in even the smallest ways.

We want to place things in the ground permanently. We want them to appear to be rooted in and flush with the soil, so they appear to be a permanent part of our “natural” surroundings. So we dig holes, we make forms, we pour in huge blobs of concrete, we remove the forms and backfill the soil, and voila! We have created “permanent” infrastructure; smooth, flush with the surface, and, seemingly, eternal.

But we can’t keep soil where we want it. And when it washes away, it puts the lie to our ability to make anything that lasts forever. It forces us to confront the fact that much of what we see as our “natural” surroundings was, in fact, put there by us to being with. And nature will have its way. It will wash the soil away until our concrete is not rooted in the earth, but teetering on top of it.

I can’t help it. I don’t understand it. But this captures my attention.

Here you can see where the concrete spilled out under its original form. This would’ve all been covered by compacted earth when this sidewalk was new.